American presidents are proclaiming more national prayer days than ever before — three for 9/11 alone (Sept. 5-7 this year) — but as the number of prayer days has increased, the fervor of presidential prayer proclamations has cooled considerably. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” has morphed into something closer to presidential renditions of kumbaya.
The God modern presidents call on with their six routinely designated days of prayer each year — Thanksgiving, the National Day of Prayer, Memorial Day and 9/11’s three days — is not nearly so fearsome as he once was. He’s rarely demanding or punitive. Even the sense that he’s actively at work in the world seems watered down.
Thanksgiving and goodwill are popular themes. Tolerance and diversity are often advised. But the tougher aspects of religious faith are often absent or carefully couched in historical terms. The sense that you gotta pay attention to God or even that you oughta is utterly absent.
It wasn’t always so.
“Fasting, humiliation and prayer” were the order of the day for the first and second Continental Congresses. George Washington’s first presidential proclamation was issued to set up a national day of thanksgiving. But thanksgiving wasn’t all that was on his mind. Even when it might seem the nation hadn’t been around long enough to do very much sinning, he advised Americans to “beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.”
Early presidents were far more anxious about keeping the wall between religion and government than more recent presidents seem to be. James Madison, facing the War of 1812, called for days of prayer and humiliation three years in a row and a day of thanksgiving in 1815, but later regretted doing so, saying that such proclamations “seem to imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.”
Thomas Jefferson refused to ask for a national day of prayer, saying such action would violate the First Amendment. For 46 years, presidents followed his lead.
Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 call for a “Day of National Humiliation, Prayer and Fasting” broke the ban. Lincoln didn’t use the word humiliation figuratively. In his 1864 Thanksgiving proclamation, he advised Americans to “get down in the dust.”
A year earlier, he’d proclaimed that “the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins.” Realize that he was talking to the North. Try to imagine a modern president speaking to his side of any issue in such a way.
And then there was Lincoln’s demand for fasting. He wasn’t talking about a juice cleanse and a day of meditation. His aim was sacrifice that would move the hand of God.
Theodore Roosevelt, no slouch when it came to preaching either, declared in his 1908 Thanksgiving proclamation: “That life is wasted, and worse than wasted, which is spent in piling, heap upon heap, those things which minister merely to the pleasure of the body and to the power that rests only on wealth.”
Early presidents expressed anxieties rarely heard in modern political discourse. Washington asked that Americans pray to be preserved from “the arrogance of prosperity.” God-fearing was a term used by Benjamin Harrison in 1892, William Howard Taft in 1912 and Calvin Coolidge in 1925.
Wartime presidents seem to avoid asking directly for triumph, almost as though petitioning to win would put them in bad standing with the Creator. Woodrow Wilson, who prayed on his knees each night, was an exception. He asked outright for victory.
It was Wilson who issued the last impassioned call for prayer, humiliation and fasting, on Decoration Day 1918. Since then, fasting and humiliation have been mentioned only in historical context. President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Day of Prayer proclamation did suggest that fasting might be a good idea for those who wished to. President Ronald Reagan asked that Americans fast on Nov. 24, 1985, in recognition of hungry people around the world, but fundraising was the point, not religious sacrifice.
As the years go by, it’s begun to seem almost as though presidential prayer day proclamations work harder on proving their right to exist. References to hallowed tradition seem more abundant. Phrases such as “Americans have always” and “it has long been a tradition” appear more routinely, and more verbiage is directed to the distant, rather than the immediate, past.
God, once so pressing and personal, so quick to punish and easy to offend, so needful of praise and apologies, seems more remote, not nearly so interested in our small doings. He seems now more concerned with elements of civil religion, the term often used to denote those American virtues most people agree on.
Maybe that’s the kind of compromise that the early presidents, so nervous about mixing religion and state, would find easy to accept. Maybe having lots of days, inviting everybody to pray or meditate or think good thoughts, directed toward God or the Universe or One’s Own Self is exactly how the founders would have hoped matters would resolve themselves.
Presidential prayer proclamations aren’t there yet. But they might be on their way.
Christine Wicker is an author and former Dallas Morning News reporter. Her email address is cwicker1195@gmail.com. This article was made possible through a grant from the Social Science Research Council’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer project through the John Templeton Foundation.
